


Sunday, Bloody Sunday

by Trixen



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-31
Updated: 2015-08-31
Packaged: 2018-04-18 05:44:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4694243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trixen/pseuds/Trixen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The summer after Buffy's death. Dawn has a secret, and its not a pretty one. After Spike fucks away her virginity, she continues to sleep with him, while angsting over her 'key' status and the Sundays spent at Church with her Mother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sunday, Bloody Sunday

Sometimes he takes breath mints after he smokes. She’s not sure why. After all, he has no breath and she can’t smell anything when he leans close and whispers her name. But his mouth does make her skin tingle when it closes over her nipple, and it feels cold. Just like the stone floor of the crypt under her ass when he flips her over and buries his face in her hair. He never makes much of a sound when he comes. His face tightens, the tip of his tongue wets his lips and she feels the cool breeze of him flood her insides.  
  
Then he rolls over and lights a cigarette.  
  
That’s usually when she goes home.  
  
~~~  
  
It’s not hard to hide anymore. It was at the beginning of the summer when everyone slipped around her carefully, as if afraid to disturb the air she breathed. It made her twitch sometimes, how goddamn *scared* they were to offend her, say *that* name in her presence—cause her to remember. But she did remember. She remembered everything. And that’s why she went to Spike.   
  
He was never careful.  
  
They smoked together the day it first happened, in the oppressive heat of midday, down in the bowels of the crypt where it smelled like dead leaves and copper pennies. He handed her the roll of shivery paper and she inhaled it with precision, coughing only slightly. It went down deep in her lungs and she lay back, staring at the black ceiling, which was covered in splatters of rotting earth.  
  
(rot in the earth)  
  
When he lay beside her, their elbows touched and she knew what would happen.  
  
Dawn… he murmured. Dawn.  
  
And then he kissed her, and he tasted like winter and berries. Like something that was *wrong* but god, she just wanted to be a girl and it was *wrong* but Buffy had Angel so she could have Spike and she knew it was *wrong* but she did it anyway. His hands were a little shaky but she stilled them with her thumbs and tasted his skin, scented with leather and cologne and the acidic smell of bleach. When he kissed her breasts she cried, because his tongue was dead just like Buffy and she wept when his fingers slipped between her knees, opened them to the invading digits and found the secret pink that was no longer a secret.  
  
When her hymen broke with a slight pop it made her feel nauseous and she turned her head, feeling his nose bury itself in her neck, his lips shiny with her melon-pineapple lip-gloss that she still slicked on out of habit. As he moved and a thin line of blood seeped down her inner thigh, she smelled burnt oranges and soot and tears burned in her eyes.  
  
Spike, she called when he came. Spike.  
  
~~~  
  
She thought everyone knew at first.  
  
But they didn’t.  
  
They started to not really _notice_ her. Willow was tinkering at the Buffybot, keeping it going so no one would notice that there was no Slayer in town. Xander and Anya kept sneaking off to distant corners of the Magic Box and sometimes she could hear whispers and giggles ((take this off, Xander)) and she felt a peculiar triumphant glee- *I know what they’re doing. I’ve done it*. Giles was drifting around her, lost and aimless, and she didn’t know how to tell him.  
  
So she kept going to Spike.  
  
They kept fucking on the floor of the crypt.   
  
Sometimes in her bedroom, late at night ((with the scent of baby powder and hair-spray surrounding them as she screamed into his shoulder)). In the ally behind the Magic Box during the twilight hours when they’d all been researching and she couldn’t stand it any longer. ((against the crates with the knotty brick breaking the skin of her back. Cold stars. Cold tears that dripped down his shoulders)). In the bathroom at school. She skipped class. ((blanket still sizzling from the Sun. hot skin. desperate kisses… someone will find us. no. no they won’t- I won’t let ‘em—hang on to me, pet))  
  
Will you look after me, Spike? she asked him sometimes. She’s gone and I have no one.  
  
Of course, Dawn, he would whisper, her name on his tongue so foreign. Now go to sleep.  
  
~~~  
  
Her mother used to take her to Church when she was alive. Every Sunday they would walk to one in town, in the morning before Mass. Buffy was in bed usually, wiped out from patrol and sleeping peacefully with purple bruises and contentment. Dawn liked that, because it meant she had her Mom all to herself.  
  
It was so quiet, so still. Gold candles burned in their sconces and her Mom would go to kneel in the pews, praying to herself. Dawn usually sat down, because sometimes she felt odd in churches- like the weight of them was pressing her into the ground. Her eyes would search the stained glass and the hallowed walls, searching for answers or God’s eyes staring back at her. But there was nothing.  
  
Once she saw a woman holding a rosary, her fingers clutching the beads, her mouth moving as she murmured the words. Her eyes were closed. Her jaw was set. But she was *alive*. Dawn watched her and felt such envy she thought she might choke. To believe in something so fiercely—she wanted that for herself.  
  
~~~  
  
Her sister is back from Heaven.   
  
Dawn still goes to see Spike.   
  
But he’s fucking both sisters now and she supposes that she’s used to it. She supposes that she doesn’t begrudge Buffy some happiness. After all, her sister has lost so much. Her life. Angel. Riley. Their Mommy. How can Dawn hate her for sleeping with Spike?  
  
But she does.  
  
She hates her so much that it makes her want to throw up.  
  
But she still goes to Spike.  
  
And he still whispers her name.  
  
((Dawn, Dawn.))  
  
~~~  
  
Yesterday she went to church for the first time since she saw her mother get put in the ground.   
  
It was a Sunday and she doesn’t like Sundays- they are holy and there is nothing holy about her body carved from green energy and bone.   
  
The red carpet squished beneath her feet as she walked up to the pew and sat down, the faint sound of someone playing the harp coming from a back room. Closing her eyes, she laid her hands on the wood of the pew in front of her and gripped it with her nails, shredding the paint.   
  
She prayed.   
  
For many things. For her sister to remember that she was alive. For her sister to stop sleeping with Spike and go back to Heaven. For life to be normal. To believe in something. For the terrible ache inside of her to go away. For the emptiness that bottomed out in the pit of her stomach as her sister dived off the tower to be filled. With anything.  
  
Let Spike finally fill me, she whispered. Let him be enough.   
  
But most of all she prayed to have that morning back. To have those seconds before 7:30. Before dawn rose and the sun split the sky. So she could stop her sister and take her place.   
  
She had a purpose.  
  
She was a key.  
  
And now, she had nothing. She was nothing. Slowly, she could feel her insides withering, her flesh beginning to collapse- and no one even could open their bloody eyes ((bloody from seeing Buffy remember Heaven. bloody from such a long, summer without her. bloody from too many Sundays with nowhere to go and no one to go with)) and *see* her. See what she is becoming.  
  
A nothing.  
  
A key without a lock to fill is nothing.  
  
~~~  
  
She walks to his crypt, cutting through the cemetery.  
  
She knows he is going to smile slowly when he sees her.  
  
She knows he is going to wind his hands through the silky mass of her hair and twist it until her scalp stings.  
  
She knows he will kiss her nipples and she will go down on her knees for him, like she always does.  
  
She knows he will press her down into the cold, cold earth that has been her reality since 7:30 on that morning when dawn came with no relief.  
  
She knows he will whisper her name.  
  
((Dawn, Dawn))  
  
She just hopes that this time… it will be enough.

 

~Finis


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